When Oleg Rostovtsev hovered between life and death after a serious operation last April, he asked friends and family to do something that, until recently, had been impossible — to pray for him by reading the Tehillim, the Hebrew Book of Psalms, in Ukrainian. Hebrew or Ukrainian, he requested, just not
Chief among the reasons for societal disunity were corruption (16%), language issues (14%), and lack of trust in authorities (13%).
Children in Latvia will no longer learn Russian as a foreign language in schools from 2026, but instead will be required to learn a language of the European Union or the European Economic Area, Latvia's Education Ministry announced on April 23.
English serves as the first foreign language Latvian schoolchildren learn, and in theory, a number of other languages are offered as the second. In reality, Russian continues to be taught as the second foreign language in more than half of Latvian schools.
When asked which language they speak at home, 12% of Ukrainians said they speak only Russian, while 59% said they speak only Ukrainian, according to a poll by the Sociological Group Rating published on April 4.
Ukraine's government has greenlit a comprehensive program aimed at bolstering the Ukrainian language's role as the state language across all aspects of public life until 2030.
The poll reflects changes in Ukrainians' perception of the Russian language outside the domestic sphere since the start of the full-scale invasion in February 2022.
